Death, Diamonds, and Deception

by Rosemary Simpson

“I’d heard about the damn thing, of course,” Lady Rotherton began, scorning to notice her niece’s quick turn of the head at the word damn. One of the British habits she most liked and had immediately and permanently espoused was the occasional use of strong language where a polite euphemism was like tepid milk in the mouth. “With all the to-ing and fro-ing across the Atlantic you’d sometimes think London and New York were the same city. Except for the weather, which in London is usually filthy at this time of year.”

  “The necklace, Aunt Gillian.”

  “William told me he planned to commission something from Tiffany that would put Mrs. Astor’s diamonds to shame,” Lady Rotherton went on as smoothly as though she hadn’t been interrupted. “I believe he fixed on the idea as soon as the French government announced the auction. There’s something compelling about owning royal jewels that a decidedly unroyal man of business can’t resist. The more he talks democracy, the more he yearns for a king. It’s one of the great dichotomies of our supposedly egalitarian society.” She made an odd, dismissive sound at the vagaries of human nature. “We all understand that Mrs. Astor is your uncrowned American queen, so this rivalry to best or unseat her is rather fun to watch. From a distance.” No one would dream of upstaging Queen Victoria, the long-widowed monarch who two years before had celebrated the Diamond Jubilee of her accession.

  “I’m afraid I don’t know very much about diamonds,” Prudence confessed.

  “It’s about time you learned,” Lady Rotherton snapped decidedly. “Your mother had some beautiful pieces that you’ll no doubt want to wear as soon as you’re married.”

  Best not to inform her aunt that her father’s second wife had sold many of Sarah MacKenzie’s jewels or had them reset to suit her more garish tastes. According to a story the late judge had once told her, Lady Rotherton was capable of stupendous rages that could last for days.

  “The first thing you must do is be able to distinguish a genuine stone from one that is not. Unfortunately, as some old family fortunes have declined, it has become rather commonplace for imitations to be commissioned. It sometimes takes a good eye to tell the difference.” She didn’t bother to explain to Prudence why it was vital to discern which of the two a woman wore around her neck or on her fingers.

  “So you knew immediately that something was wrong with the necklace Lena De Vries was wearing?” Prudence asked.

  “I could spot the difference between the stones from halfway across the room,” Lady Rotherton declared unequivocally. “I don’t know why no one else saw it before now. All I had to do to confirm what I already suspected was breathe on them. Diamonds clear almost instantaneously while fakes do not. It’s really quite simple. I assume William explained all this to you?”

  “You managed it beautifully,” Prudence said. “I don’t imagine even Lena realized what you were doing until much later.”

  “Of course she did,” Lady Rotherton retorted. “If it hadn’t been for the smelling salts I was holding beneath her nose, she would have collapsed at my feet. Believe me, Prudence, she was well aware of the fraud she was perpetrating. And terrified that William would learn of it. That’s why she was looking so pale and unsettled. It had nothing to do with the heat of the room.”

  “We’re here,” Prudence said as the carriage rolled to a halt before a mansion that rivaled anything the Vanderbilts had constructed along Fifth Avenue. She thought she understood now why Lady Rotherton had insisted on coming with her this morning, and also why she’d remained silent on the subject of the De Vries diamonds until now. The way her aunt spoke William De Vries’s name told her that the friendship dating back to before Gillian Vandergrift left America to marry a title had developed over the years and his many London visits into something considerably warmer.

  She wondered if Lady Rotherton knew how much of herself she gave away to the niece trained by a master litigator and judge to read through the layers of deception with which people protected the secrets they most wanted to hide.

  * * *

  Geoffrey began with the merchants on either side of James Carpenter’s jewelry shop. Its front door and display windows had been crisscrossed with rough wood planks, nailed firmly in place to discourage looters. The few early morning shoppers on Eighteenth Street gave it a wide berth, hurrying past with a sidelong glance as if they expected the door to open and a river of blood to flow out over their shoes. The Times had buried the story on its back pages, but the city’s other newspapers had supplied all the gory details of the murder and added speculation about the motive, none of it based on anything more factual than the reporters’ fertile imaginations.

  “Carpenter kept to himself,” the haberdasher who had first identified the body said, folding and refolding a brightly patterned silk waistcoat. “I don’t mean he was standoffish, because he was friendly enough, but he didn’t have much to say for himself and he never talked about his clients.”

  “You told the police that he employed a young man to help him in the shop,” Geoffrey said.

  “We’ve been getting more street traffic the past year or so,” the gentleman’s outfitter volunteered. “Especially after Thanksgiving. People shopping for Christmas gifts, you know.”

  “So the young man he hired to clerk for him was only here for a very short time? Didn’t you tell the detective that you hadn’t seen him in a while?” There were inherent contradictions in what the haberdasher was claiming. Pointing them out was one way of getting to the truth of the matter.

  “Well, he worked odd hours and not all the time. I wouldn’t see him for a few days and then he’d show up again. There wasn’t any pattern to it.” Now he rearranged a stack of already perfectly aligned cravats. “Actually what I thought was that Mr. Carpenter was giving occasional employment to a nephew or perhaps a cousin’s son. Maybe the lad was looking for something permanent, but in the meanwhile was helping out behind the counter and running errands when needed.”

  “The lad? How old would you say he was, this nephew or cousin’s son?”

  “Early twenties would be my best guess. I only saw him from a distance.”

  “But close enough so you remember he had yellow hair and a squint.”

  “I did step outside one day as he was arriving. He doffed his hat and said good morning. Very polite.”

  “And his name?”

  “We weren’t introduced. And I don’t recall Mr. Carpenter ever mentioning it.”

  “So when was the first time you remember seeing this anonymous young man with the yellow hair?”

  The haberdasher had to think about it. “Six or eight months ago, perhaps? It was in early summer, I believe. I remember thinking that he didn’t look very much like a customer.”

  “How so?”

  “His suit was a bit shabby and his boots weren’t polished. Not the kind of person you’d expect to see going into a jeweler’s shop in this part of the city.”

  “Unless he was casing it,” Geoffrey said.

  “That did occur to me. But then he came back. Very irregularly, as I said, but he soon became a familiar figure and I got used to seeing him.”

  “When was the last time he was in Carpenter’s store?”

  “Two weeks ago. I didn’t remark it much until the police asked if I’d seen anyone suspicious hanging around. I hadn’t. But then I got to thinking that the young fellow who’d been helping out there hadn’t shown up in a while. I suppose he could have found other work.”

  But from the tone of the merchant’s voice, Geoffrey could tell he doubted it.

  The other shopkeepers on the street had nothing to add to what the haberdasher recalled. They seemed more interested in what kind of enterprise would be moving into the now empty store and when it would reopen than in getting to the bottom of James Carpenter’s sudden demise.

  The one clue to the missing shop assistant’s identity came not from Carpenter’s neighboring storekeepers on Eighteenth Street, but from Danny Dennis.

  “The sweepers who work this area
all remember him. He had a smile and sometimes a penny or two for them,” Dennis told Geoffrey, adjusting the feed bag of oats and cracked corn into which he’d fitted Mr. Washington’s broad, white muzzle. “They get to know the regulars pretty quickly. No names, of course, but faces and whether or not they’re good for a touch.” Sweeping up the piles of manure that littered the streets was a tough and dirty job; without the gangs of street boys wielding brushes and shovels, the city’s roadways would very soon become nearly impassable.

  “Did any of them see what direction he came from?”

  “Not on a regular basis, but one of the sweeper boys claims to have seen him down around the Five Points where the Italians are moving in on the Irish gangs. He thinks he lives there and came up here whenever Carpenter sent word he needed him.”

  “Does he have proof of any of that?”

  “You know how these boys are, Mr. Hunter. They keep their eyes open and their hands out, but most of what they sell is speculation. A lot of them are biding their time until they’re old enough and tough enough to get into one of the gangs. It’s not an easy life, but for the orphan sweepers sleeping in the streets, it’s more attractive that what they’ve got; they’re desperate to belong somewhere.”

  “I’ve seen Jacob Riis’s photographs.”

  “He’s only touching the surface. For every tenement room shared by three families, there are dozens of others far worse.”

  “Are you up to going down to Five Points, Danny?”

  “I am. But I think we’d be wise to take Mr. Ned Hayes with us, if he’s available. Everybody in the city knows the police department fired him for saving Billy McGlory’s life. That’s enough to keep knives in their sheaths and pistols in their holsters—for a while, at least.”

  “McGlory’s out of the picture, or so Ned says.”

  “For the moment. But he’s not forgotten. He’s still a power to be reckoned with. And nobody believes he’ll move out to Long Island to cultivate vegetables. He’ll be back. And when he does resurface, anyone who used to deal with him will want to be on his good side. Stepping on Mr. Hayes wouldn’t be the way to do that. He’s like an insurance policy that pays off more than once.”

  Danny ran a lightly oiled rag over the long driver’s whip, as lethal as a bullet in the right hands. He uncoupled Mr. Washington’s feed bag, waited for Geoffrey to seat himself in the cab, then eased out into the midmorning traffic, a loaded revolver tucked into his belt and another hidden beneath his footboard. A razor sharp knife was strapped to his right ankle.

  It was best not to take any chances in the Five Points.

  CHAPTER 6

  The De Vries mansion was darkly opulent and affluently silent, furnished from floor to ceiling with imported antique tables, chairs, and sofas in varying styles of pre-Revolution French courts. English landscape paintings adorned the walls, enormous Chinese vases lurked in all the corners, the windows were draped in heavy velvet, and Turkish carpets in faded jewel tones muffled footsteps and stray voices. It was, Prudence thought, as gloomy as a lily-drenched funeral parlor, without the corpse.

  Lady Rotherton had informed the butler that Mrs. De Vries, despite the early hour, would indeed receive them. Trained in England, he took one look at Her Ladyship and was immediately convinced that contradiction or argument would not be tolerated. Nor would they do a bit of good. Bowing deeply, he ushered Prudence and her aunt to the morning parlor, offered coffee in case their wait should be longer than a few minutes, and left to deliver the news of their unexpected arrival.

  “Remind me again how well you know Lena De Vries, Prudence,” Lady Rotherton said as soon as the butler had departed and an aproned parlor maid delivered the coffee tray.

  “Not well at all. William De Vries was a frequent visitor to the house when I was very young, but he and my father always closeted themselves in the library together. I was sometimes paraded in from the nursery to say a brief hello and drop a curtsy, but hardly more than that. After Father married Victoria he met his men friends at one or the other of his clubs. No one came to the house anymore. Even Father stayed away as much as he could. I mainly remember Lena as another of the ladies in big hats and veils who leaned over to say something I didn’t understand after church on Sundays.”

  “William spoke very little of her when he came to London,” Lady Rotherton volunteered. “Not entirely unexpected, under the circumstances. I introduced him to the Marlborough House Set; he and His Royal Highness get along very well. They have cards, horses, and women in common.”

  It seemed to Prudence a strange conversation to be having in the lady’s own parlor, but her aunt’s instinct for rents in the fabric of polite society had already proved to be exceptionally acute. And as she had learned from Geoffrey, no bit of information was too insignificant to be ignored, especially during the early days of an investigation.

  Lady Rotherton contended that Lena was aware that some of the stones she had worn to the Assembly Ball were fake. It would be up to Prudence to persuade Lena to confirm or disprove that allegation. She intended to question William De Vries’s wife until she was satisfied Lena had told them everything she could. As politely as possible, Prudence would have to convince her aunt that she knew what she was doing.

  “I think it would be best if you were to leave most of the questioning to me, Aunt,” Prudence began.

  “You’re not a Pinkerton, my dear, no matter how well Mr. Hunter has trained you in their methods,” Lady Rotherton declared, peering disapprovingly into the silver coffeepot.

  “But I have had considerable experience getting to the bottom of things,” Prudence insisted.

  “I doubt Mrs. De Vries will take kindly to being asked personal questions by someone young enough to be her daughter. It’s simply not done, Prudence.”

  “Nevertheless, Aunt . . .” Prudence was on the point of saying something she later thought she would have regretted when the parlor door opened to a very pale and exhausted-looking Lena De Vries.

  “I do hope you’ll forgive my having kept you waiting,” she said, gliding warily across the room, one hand lightly touching the back of every piece of furniture she passed, as if seeking reassurances of support.

  “I regret that my visit had to be on such short notice,” Prudence said. My visit.

  “William told me to expect either you or Mr. Hunter.” Lena seated herself opposite Lady Rotherton, nodding politely at each of her guests in turn.

  “Then you know why I’m here,” Prudence continued smoothly.

  “I do. But I’m not sure I can be of help.” Lena folded her hands neatly in her lap. The fingers twitched as though desperate to twist themselves into knots. “I was as surprised as you, Lady Rotherton, to learn that some of the diamonds in my necklace were not what they appeared to be.”

  “I rather doubt that, Lena,” Lady Rotherton said. “I hope I may call you Lena, my dear. Your husband and I have been on first-name terms for many years. I should so like it if we, too, were to dispense with formality.”

  “Will you tell us the story of the necklace, from the beginning?” Prudence said before Lady Rotherton could get another word in, before their hostess realized that one of her guests had just implied she’d deliberately lied to them.

  “It was a gift,” Lena began.

  “And a very splendid one, I must say,” Lady Rotherton commented. “But then, William is the soul of gentlemanly generosity.”

  What on earth is she doing? Prudence wondered how she would deflect her aunt’s remark. No wife could miss the obvious implication. “I’m sure it must have been a delightful surprise.”

  “The design is not a Tiffany original,” Lena continued. “It seems there was a drawing of what was to have been created for Queen Marie Antoinette to celebrate the birth of the Dauphin in 1781. No one knows why the king changed his mind, but the necklace was never made. The stones that had been selected for it were still in the royal coffers at the time of the Revolution, and they were included in the auction
. William commissioned Tiffany to replicate it, and they agreed.”

  “What a lovely story,” Lady Rotherton purred.

  “Where is the necklace usually kept?” Prudence asked.

  “William leases a vault at Tiffany for the most valuable family pieces,” Lena said.

  “Is all your jewelry kept in the vault?”

  “Just the items he judges irreplaceable. Most of what I wear every day and to all but the most exclusive balls is here in the house. I have a safe in my dressing room, and there’s another one in the library. But, really, Miss MacKenzie, it’s not something we’ve ever worried about. Our servants are well-trained and loyal. Many of them have been with us for years.”

  “I’m sure my niece would not object to your calling her by her first name, as you undoubtedly did when she was a child,” Lady Rotherton interrupted smoothly.

  Lena nodded. “You and Morgan played so sweetly together,” she murmured nostalgically.

  “Can you take us back through the day of the Assembly Ball?” Prudence asked, borrowing a leaf from Geoffrey’s book about never allowing a witness to direct or deflect an interrogation. “Begin with whoever was to retrieve the necklace from Tiffany’s vault. I assume it wasn’t done any earlier than that Thursday.”

  “Actually it was the day before,” Lena said. “And that was a last-minute change of plans no one could have known about in advance.”

  “May I take it that one of Tiffany’s bonded messengers delivered the necklace directly to you, and that you signed for it?” Prudence went on.

  “I wasn’t here,” Lena stammered.

  Lady Rotherton’s eyebrows shot up. She set down her coffee cup with exaggerated care, then fixed a gimlet-eyed stare on William’s wife. A generation younger than her husband. And yes, Lena De Vries was every bit as beautiful as gossip had reported her being. Pale, porcelain skin; deeply violet eyes; midnight black hair without a thread of silver to hint that she had passed her fortieth birthday. No wonder William had been smitten by the wealthy young widow who at the time he met her was mother to a six-year-old boy. The first Mrs. De Vries had never conceived. He must have expected his world to change when he took Lena Whitley to wife. But it hadn’t. He’d remained a childless husband, desperate for a son to succeed him in the banking and investment businesses that had made him one of America’s wealthiest men.